This invention relates to firearms, in particular to a replaceable barrel unit that can fire non-lethal blanks and be substituted for existing barrels in handguns.
Handguns have been modified over the years to be able to fire blanks. Early in the twentieth century, screw-in inserts (U.S. Pat. No. 1,092,157 to Mauser) and subcaliber practice barrels (U.S. Pat. No. 1,517,328 to Weiss) were developed to modify handguns for firing blanks. Another typical technique for modifying the barrel on a handgun is either to plug or cap the open barrel end as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,829,180 to Leiter or U.S. Pat. No. 6,176,032 to Cohen et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 3,766,822 to Sophinos, or provide a restrictor type washer inside the barrel. However, there are many problems with these well known techniques. For example, the existing barrels must be permanently modified in order to use these separate components which usually ruins the barrel's use for firing real ammunition. Thus, users must purchase new barrels in order to reuse the handgun to fire real ammunition, which is an added expense as well as an extra time consuming matter. Additionally, the separate components such as the plugs can be dangerous since these components can detach from the barrels and become moving projectiles when the handgun is being fired. Still furthermore, many of the blank firing handguns use real ammunition when being fired, which can also become dangerous if the plug type components fail and the real ammunition passes out of the firing handgun.
Other blank firing devices describe replaceable barrels with multiple parts, such as, inserts, recoil boosters as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,907,489; 5,140,893; 5,433,134; 6,357,331. Still furthermore, many of the prior art techniques require extensive modifications and many added parts and assembly required to be used with existing handguns, which is also an extra time consuming expense.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.